Exploring queer spaces around the world, from brutalist Japanese homes to Dhaka rooftops

What was the process of researching queer spaces around the world like? Can you highlight any favourites?
We wanted a global reach in the book; the publisher is the Royal Institute of British Architects, so it made sense for us to begin by charting UK-based spaces, but we also managed to include queer spaces in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Cuba, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, the Philippines, Spain, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Uganda, and many more countries.

It was essential that the author of each vignette knew about the space from their own experience, and lived in or was from that part of the world. The academic Soon-Tzu Speechley, for example, examined discreet sites of congregation for queer people in 19th-century shophouses in Singapore and Malaysia.

However, there were inevitable limitations on what could be included, owing to a lack of space, the strength of our networks in different parts of the world, and sometimes safety. There is, for instance, only one case study from the 22 Arabic-speaking countries, namely the Haven for Artists in Beirut, Lebanon. As Nour Hamade puts it in our book, “Taboo and silence have contributed to a stifling and restrictive environment which queer people in the Middle East are forced to navigate”.

We managed to include several spaces in Africa. South Africa is relatively more open to queer life both legally and culturally than most African countries. We included a vignette about an annual party called the Locker Room project, a queer Gesamtkunstwerk in Cape Town, which emerged following new freedoms for queer people in the post-Apartheid constitution of 1994. Historically, these freedoms applied exclusively to white people, speaking to the uneven histories of race and sexuality.

Another space in Africa is the empowering Sappho Islands bar in Kampala, the first and only queer bar and nightclub in Uganda when it opened in 2010; it closed in 2011 owing to Uganda’s crackdown on homosexuality, extending back to the British penal code from 1950.

This 19th-century colonial law was also inherited by Bangladesh, where homosexuality remains illegal. In the latter case, we were lucky enough to feature the cautious, empathetic work of Ruhul Abdin, an urban researcher working between Bangladesh and the UK. Thanks to this work, we were able to include some spaces in the country; one of them, a park for cruising, was necessarily code-named as XXX.

In your eyes, is there such a thing as a “queer aesthetic” in architecture and interiors? What does it mean to express queerness through one’s design work?
This is always tricky to answer. Yes, there can be such a thing as a queer aesthetic, but it is entirely dependent on an individual’s, or a community’s, own understanding.

This is demonstrated clearly in the book, which ranges from the queerness of the high-camp New York architect Alan Buchsbaum to the almost spartan Light Coffin in Chiba, Japan. The latter is a queer domestic haven for a same-sex male couple designed by the architect Osamu Ishiyama. Closed to prying eyes from the outside, but entirely open-plan within, the building uniquely responds to the needs of its users, defying ingrained heteronormative understandings of the spatiality of domestic life.

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Have you noticed that spaces change as the community inhabits them? How have you observed that queer people make these spaces their own?
They simply serve the very specific needs of their community—but of course, there are lots of similarities, especially the need for a safe haven of expression, and a place free from external intrusion and judgment.

One example is the Centro Cultural Guanuca in Nicaragua, a multi-coloured, mural-clad community centre for the safe congregation of queer people of all kinds. It’s a colonial-style, 19th-century building renovated in the 1980s, and run since the 1990s by a feminist collective, self-consciously as a site of resistance.

When it was still in operation, it had a small library, a workshop space, a central patio with covered walkways, a kitchen and café bar, private meeting rooms, and even a therapy space. The first publicly acknowledged pride event took place at the centre. It ranged in use and scale, from private meetings to public-facing pride celebrations. Sadly, it closed its doors in 2021 due to the political climate.

Another space is the Kloset Yuri Book Club in Bangkok, a space for literary queer women and non-binary people to meet and socialise. It is part of two townhouses. The feel and atmosphere of the space are inspired by the Todd Haynes movie Carol from 2015, starring Cate Blanchett.

The owner of the book club, Kilin, says that “she was completely enraptured by Blanchett’s character [in Carol], and wanted to make the space, like the journey of the character in the film, about finding happiness in the present: a place where as an LGBT+ individual, one can be unselfconsciously free from having to conform to any kind of gender norms”.

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We’ve come across queer walking tours in various cities around the world. What do you believe is the value in highlighting this community history and heritage of our neighbourhoods and architecture?
It is important only where it is safe. In some contexts, it is of course dangerous to foreground the existence of queer spaces. Another way to do this is to highlight spaces that existed in the past. Walking tours, though, where safe, can offer a much-needed opportunity to bring visibility to queer communities, and also serve as an essential reminder of the community’s very distant and very recent past.

Another means is memorialisation. Conspicuous and public, rather than inconspicuous and private, is the Homomonument in Amsterdam, which takes the form of three triangles in radiant Rosa Porino granite on the bank of the Keizersgracht canal, designed by the architect Karin Daan in 1987.

It memorialises homosexual victims who were persecuted during the Nazi occupation of the country. Each of the triangles symbolises something different: one, the present; another, the oppression and homophobic violence queer people faced in the past; and the third, hope for the future.

There is a certain tension between queer community spaces (often working-class) being seen as “degenerate”, and the “respectable” and decorated upper-class queer design that’s perceived as refined and elevated. Can you comment on this?
If I might respond here with the example of Britain—the structures of an elitist and patriarchal society in the UK have made it rare for the historian to be able to access working-class queer voices, which were even more silenced than those in elite gay spaces. It is too often believed that queer lives could exist only in middle or upper-class society.

Our book stands to correct this, by profiling several spaces where homosexuality flourished, perhaps even more openly and powerfully, in the working-class culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. We profile, by way of example, the steelworking industry of Sheffield in the early 20th century. So, in answer to your question, I think that hierarchy is breaking down with new queer scholarship.

Throughout history, many queer individuals who had the means to, retreated to secluded homes that provided them with a safe space to live their lives. Are there any such homes that stood out to you in your research?

Plas Newydd in North Wales was the idiosyncratic home of Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, known in their time as the Ladies of Llangollen, who, as aristocratic spinsters having eloped from Ireland, settled there together in 1779, making it their shared haven for half a century. Rejecting the impositions of patriarchal domestic arrangements, they built a new life of rural retirement and self-improvement.

I would also like to mention one example of the found families that form an essential support structure for their community, namely the Bangladeshi hijra (whose identities transgress the dominant Western dichotomy of female and male or woman and man). A hijra guru ma’s rooftop in Dhaka’s old town is profiled in our book.

Hijra lie outside normative systems of caste, class, religion and reproduction, and often live marginalised on the fringes of society. They necessarily come together to create an alternative form of collective kinship, finding sanctuary in the care of a hijra guru ma (or, mother of the house).

How do you hope your book will impact architects and designers? What kind of impact have you observed thus far?
Our primary aim was to help students identify a plethora of precedents of queer spaces throughout time and place, to help them sanction their design work in the face of prevailing discrimination in architecture (and its pedagogies).

When visiting studios at the University of Cambridge, the Bartlett in London, and the Glasgow School of Art, we have found that many students have referred to our book to help them justify their own projects. The book also brought together an incredible family of queer artists, curators, architects, historians, archivists, tattoo artists, DJs, and more, who formed new groupings and sparked further empowering work on queer spaces.

Additionally, the book’s publication coincided with vital new projects in architectural schools. For instance, the Cambridge University architectural student Mary Holmes won the Royal Institute of British Architects’ national Bronze Prize for the best design project in 2023, awarding her project Almshouses for Queer Elders. The project repurposed everyday terraced housing to create ‘a site of permeable refuge’ for older queer people.

She said the project was intended as “a protest and a provocation within and against a system of architectural education that continues to exclude queer theory, queer lives, from its teaching”. Our book is one small step along the way to positive change for queerness in architecture.

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